13 years later
In the summer of 1995, shortly before retiring from DEA, I was in Riga, Latvia doing a drug training course for a class of Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian cops. Our team was staying at the newly-built SAS Radisson Hotel, and we were able to follow world news on CNN. On the first day of our school, the students were asked if they had any questions. The first guy who raised his hand asked, "Who in the Hell is OJ Simpson?"
Today, I watched OJ Simpson sentenced to a long term in prison for his armed robbery caper in Las Vegas. Thirteen years earlier, I had watched the outrageous verdict in Los Angeles when a predominantly black jury ignored an avalanche of evidence and pronounced him, "not guilty". The shocked reaction of most white observers, mixed with the jubilant reaction of most black observers set race relations back in this country for a while.
Today, it seems that America has moved on from OJ Simpson. I think most blacks realize by now that the guy is a bum-and a murderer to boot. Simpson pretty much stands alone today aside from his family and lawyers.
After Simpson and his co-defendant, Clarence Stewart, gave their statements, the judge took a tortuously long time in making her statement before pronouncing sentence. There was a reason for that; Judge Glass was "protecting the record" as they say-especially when she reiterated that Simpson's murder case was playing no role in this case and her sentencing. (That removes any serious hope of Simpson's lawyers appealing the conviction or the sentencing on grounds that their client was being punished for the murder case in which he got off.) By the way, Stewart, who stands to be the answer to a trivia question, got 15 years.
Even after Simpson's sentence was pronounced, in which the most serious count got 15 years, there was confusion as to how long he must actually serve since there was a consecutive sentence imposed. It appears that Simpson will have to serve a minimum of 9 years before being eligible for parole and could serve as long as 33 years.
Once again, Fred and Kim Goldman were seated in the courtroom watching Simpson get his justice. They can take grim satisfaction from the fact that it was their never-ending campaign to hound Simpson with their civil judgement in Santa Monica that was a factor in pushing him to commit the deed for which he will now serve time in prison.
Fred and Kim Goldman are people I greatly admire. They were abused by the system in the murder trial. I will never forget the scene of shock and grief as the Goldmans heard Simpson being pronounced, "not guilty" by a clearly biased jury, Kim crying in the courtroom and Fred with a completely shocked look on his face. It was truly heartbreaking.
Yet, they continued to work within the law trying to find some measure of justice for their murdered son, Ron. I don't think I could have followed the course Fred Goldman followed. For that, he is a greater man than I. If it had been me, I guess I would have been in jail these past thirteen years. I'll leave it at that.
Today was a good day.
I think part of it was that people were afraid that the wrong verdict might set off another riot, a la Rodney King.
ReplyDeleteBryan,
ReplyDeleteWhich verdict are you referring to? If you are talking about the LA verdict, I disagree. There were indeed a lot of people worrying about a riot if Simpson was convicted. The LAPD was on alert.
Yet, I think the reason he was convicted is because there were 9 black jurors who bought into the race-base defense of Johnny Cochran. One young black male juror gave a black power salute as he left the courtroom.
What I think happened is the the 9 black jurors basically told the other 3 who included an elderly woman that they were going to acquit-period.
It may or may not be relevant, but in my career with DEA, I participated in hundreds of trials. Usually I was just a prosecution witness, but often I was the lead agent on the case and thus, sat at the prosecution table with the Asst US Attorney prosecuting.
Generally, when a jury takes a longer time to deliberate, the prosecution starts to worry. When a jury comes back after a couple of hours-that's usually a good sign for the prosecution. It means the case was strong and they were convinced of guilt.
This case was a reversal of that. It also turned another thing on its head that I and many of my colleagues had been led to believe in our careers when the defendant was black and you had black jurors.
In the 1970s, I was involved in the prosecution of the Leslie Atkinson organization in North Carolina. This organization was considerd to nbe the biggest heroin importing organization in the world. (If you watch the
movie, American gangster, the Denzell Washington character, Frank Lucas, received his heroin from this group. Aside from that, most everything in the movie was bs. Anyway, Atkinson and his group were importing hundreds of kilos of heroin from bangkok into the US. I was one of the agents working the case in Bangkok and was called to Raleigh in 1976 for the trial.
Well, to get to the point, all of the defendants were black, and we had a fair number of black jurors as I recall. I will never forget what the chief prosecutor told me. He said when he had a black defendant, he wanted as many black jurors as possible because he knew they would see through the bs and render the correct verdict. I believed in that from my own experiences for the rest of my career.
Then the OJ case turned it all on its head. When you combine race with celebrity-you have a problem. That was the formula in the OJ trial. I firmly believe had he been a black nobody or a famous white defendant, the case would have ended differently.
Gary, don't you think that a lot of the verdict had to do with the botched job of the LAPD? I mean, they're supposed to convict only if there isn't a shadow of doubt.
ReplyDeleteDon't get me wrong, that doesn't necessarily null your answer, but don't you think that's a factor as well?
You raise a good point, Lance. The bloody fingerprint on the back gate that was not collected, the pitiful testimony of Dennis Fung, the incompetence of Chris Darden, and most of all the Mark Furman fiasco didn't help. Generally, when a prosecution witness is caught lying on the stand, your case is pretty much done. I would argue, however, that all that stuff about Fuhrman had no relevance to the case and should not have been admitted.
ReplyDeleteFinally, in spite of all that, the prosecution did, in fact, prove its case. The fact that Mark Fuhrman may have used the N-word in the past should hardly have carried all that weight. (he should have owned up to it.) The bottom line is that you never-never lie on the witness stand. If you do your job honestly and competently, tell the truth, you don't have to worry about being
cross-examined-even by the best defense attorneys.
In spite of all the above. If those things had not happened, the verdict would have been the same, in my view.